The Butcher of Congo

By Baffour Ankomah, New African, October 1999

Only 90 years ago, the agents of King Leopold II of Belgium
massacred 10 million Africans in the Congo. Cutting off
hands as we see in Sierra Leone today, was very much part of
Leopold's repertoire. Today, Leopold's "rubber terror" has
all been swept under the carpet. Adam Hochschild calls it
"the great forgetting" in his brilliant new book, King
Leopold's Ghost, recently published by Macmillan. This is a
story of greed, exploitation and brutality that Africa and
the world must not forget.

This story is actually best understood when told in reverse
order. Leopold never set foot in "his" Congo Free State - for
all the 23 years (1885-1908) he ruled what Hochschild
calls "the world's only colony claimed by one man".

It was a vast territory which "if superimposed on the map of
Europe", says Hochschild, "would stretch from Zurich to
Moscow to central Turkey. It was bigger than England,
France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined. Although mostly
rainforest and savannah, it also embraced volcanic hills and
mountains covered by snow and glaciers, some of whose peaks
reached higher than the Alps."

Leopold's "rubber terror" raised a lot of hairs in Britain,
America and continental Europe (particularly between the
years 1900-1908). But while they were condemning Leopold's
barbarity, his accusers were committing much the same
atrocities against Africans elsewhere on the continent.

Hochschild tells it better: "True, with a population loss
estimated at 10 million people, what happened in the Congo
could reasonably be called the most murderous part of the
European Scramble for Africa. But that is so only if you
look at sub-Saharan Africa as the arbitrary checkerboard
formed by colonial boundaries.

"With a decade of [Leopold's] head start [in the Congo],
similar forced labour systems for extracting rubber were in
place in the French territories west and north of the Congo
River, in Portuguese-ruled Angola, and in the nearby
Cameroon under the Germans.

"In France's equatorial African territories, where the
region's history is best documented, the amount of
rubber-bearing land was far less than what Leopold
controlled, but the rape was just as brutal. Almost all
exploitable land was divided among concession companies.
Forced labour, hostages, slave chains, starving porters,
burned villages, paramilitary company 'sentries', and the
chicotte were the order of the day. [The chicotte was a
vicous whip made out of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide,
cut into a long sharp-edged cork-screw strip. It was applied
to bare buttocks, and left permanent scars. Twenty strokes
of it sent victims into unconsciousness; and a 100 or more
strokes were often fatal. The chicotte was freely used by
both Leopold's men and the French].

"Thousands of refugees who had fled across the Congo River
to escape Leopold's regime eventually fled back to escape
the French [in Congo-Brazzaville]. The population loss in
the rubber-rich equatorial rainforest owned by France is
estimated, just as in Leopold's Congo, at roughly 50%."

Hochschild cannot fathom how the reform movement in Europe
focused exclusively on Leopold's Congo when "if you reckon
[the] mass murder by the percentage of the population
killed", the Germans did as much in Namibia, if not worse,
than Leopold in Congo.

"By these standards", Hochschild argues, "the toll was even
worse among the Hereros in German South West Africa, today's
Namibia. The killing there was masked by no smokescreen of
talk about philanthropy. It was genocide, pure and simple,
starkly announced in advance.

"After losing much of their land to the Germans, the Hereros
rebelled in 1904. In response, Germany sent in a heavily
armed force under Lt-Gen Lothar von Trotha, who issued an
extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl):

'Within the German boundaries every Herero, whether found
with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, shall be
shot... Signed: The Great General of the Mighty Kaiser, von
Trotha.'

"In case everything was not clear, an addendum specified:
'No male prisoners will be taken."

By the time von Trotha's murderous hordes had finished their
job in 1906, fewer than 20,000 of the 80,000 Herreros who
lived in Namibia in 1903 remained.

"The others [more than 60,000 of them]", writes Hochschild,
"had been driven into the desert to die of thirst (the
Germans poisoned the waterholes), were shot, or - to
economise on bullets - bayoneted or clubbed to death with
rifle stocks."

Hochschild tries to be fair here by pointing to what the
Americans and the British were doing, or had done,
elsewhere.

"Around the time the Germans were slaughtering the Hereros,"
he writes, "the world was largely ignoring America's brutal
counter-guerrilla war in the Phillipines, in which US troops
tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed 20,000 rebels,
and saw 200,000 more Filipinos die of war-related hunger or
disease.

"Britain [too] came in for no international criticism for
its killings of Aborigines in Australia, in accordance with
extermination orders as ruthless as Von Trotha's. And, of
course, in neither Europe nor the United States was there
major protest against the decimation of the American
Indians."

Hochschild then poses the controversial question: "When
these other mass murders went largely unnoticed except by
their victims, why, in England and the United States, was
there such a storm of righteous protest about the Congo?"

He answers the question himself: "What happened in the Congo
was indeed mass murder on a vast scale, but the sad truth is
that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more
murderous than many Europeans then at work or at war
elsewhere in Africa. Conrad said it best [in his book, Heart
of Darkness, based on the brutalities in the Congo]: 'All
Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz'."

Kurtz is Joseph Conrad's lead character in Heart of
Darkness. He is "both a murderous head collector and an
intellectual, an emissary of science and progress, a
painter, a poet and a journalist, and an author of a 17-page
report to the International Society for the Suppression of
Savage Customs, at the end of which he scrawls in shaky
hand: 'Exterminate all the brutes'."

Hochshild believes that Kurtz was Leon Rom in real life. Rom
was born in Mons in Belgium. Poorly educated, he joined the
Belgian army aged 16. Nine years later, aged 25 in 1886, he
found himself in the Congo in search of adventure. He became
district commissioner at Matadi and was later put in charge
of the African troops in Leopold's murderous Force Publique
army in the Congo.

Rom's brutality knew no bounds. It was such that even the
white people working with him were shocked to their boots.

"When Rom was station chief at Stanley Falls," Hochshild
reveals, "the governor general sent a report back to
Brussels about some agents who 'have the reputation of
having killed masses of people for petty reasons'. He
mentions Rom's notorious flower bed rigged with human heads,
and then adds: 'He kept a gallows permanently erected in
front of the station'."

Conrad had himself gone to Congo in 1890 at the time Rom was
committing his atrocities. "The moral landscape of Heart of
Darkness", writes Hochshild, "and the shadowy figure at its
centre are the creations not just of a novelist but of an
open-eyed observer who caught the spirit of a time and place
with piercing accuracy."

So, how did Leopold come to own such a vast territory,
exploited it, killed its people, took away its riches and
never set foot in it?

Three things stand out in this sad story - the naivety of
the African kings and people; the misfits of Europe sent to
subdue the Africans; and the superior weapons of war that
the Europeans possessed which the Africans lacked.

When the first Europeans (the Portuguese) arrived in Congo
in 1482, they met a thriving African kingdom. "Despite the
contempt for Kongo culture," says Hochschild, "the
Portuguese grudgingly recognised in the kingdom a
sophisticated and well-developed state - the leading one on
the west coast of central Africa. It was an imperial
federation, of two or three million people, covering an area
roughly 3,000 sq miles, some of which lie today in several
countries after the Europeans had drawn arbitrary border
lines across Africa in 1886."

The great fascination of the Congo at the time was its
mighty 3,000-mile river, variously called Lualaba, Nzadi or
Nzere by the people who lived on its banks. Nzere means "the
river that swallows all rivers" because of its many
tributaries. Just one tributary, the Kasai, carries as much
water as Europe's longest river, the Volga in Russia and it
is half as long as the Rhine. Another tributary, the Ubangi
is even longer. On Portuguese tongue, Nzere became Zaire
which was adopted by Mobutu when he renamed the country in
1971. Like most things African, the Europeans changed the
river's name to Congo.

In 1482 when the Portuguese sailor Diogo C%o accidentally
came upon the river as it emptied into the Atlantic, he was
astounded by its sheer size. "Modern oceanographers", writes
Hochschild, "have discovered more evidence of the great
river's strength in its 'pitched battle with the ocean': a
100-mile-long canyon, in place 4,000 feet deep, that the
river has carved out of the sea floor... It pours some 1.4
million cubic feet of water per second into the ocean; only
the Amazon carries more water."

Thanks to satellite technology, the world now knows that
much of the river's basin lies on a plateau which rises
nearly 1,000 feet high 220 miles from the Atlantic coast.
Thus the river descends to sea level in a furious 220-mile
dash down the plateau.

"During this tumultous descent," writes Hochshild, "the
river squeezes through narrow canyons, boils up in waves of
40 feet high, and tumbles over 32 separate cataracts. So
great is the drop and the volume of water that these 220
miles have as much hydroelectric potential as all the lakes
and rivers of the United States combined."

In all, the river (Africa's second longest) drains more than
1.3 million square miles, "an area larger than India,"
Hochschild testifies. "It has an estimated one-sixth of the
world's hydroelectric potential... Its fan-shaped web of
tributaries constitute more than seven thousand miles of
interconnecting waterways, a built-in transportation grid
rivalled by few places on earth."

Thus, Congo was a jewel any colonialist would kill for. And
the lot fell to Henry Morton Stanley to colonise it for King
Leopold II.

Stanley was Welsh but he passed himself round as an
American. He had first stumbled on the river on his second
trip to Africa. Because the river flowed north from this
point, Stanley thought it was the Nile.

Stanley's background tells a lot about the brutality he
unleashed on the Africans he met on his journeys. He had
been born a "bastard" in the small Welsh market town of
Denbigh on 28 January 1841. His mother, Betsy Parry (a
housemaid) had recorded him on the birth register of St
Hillary's Church in Denbigh as "John Rowlands, Bastard". His
father was believed to be a local drunkard called John
Rowlands who died of delirium tremens, a severe pyschotic
condition occurring in some alcoholics.

John Rowlands Bastard was the first of his mother's five
illegitimate children. After an exceptionally difficult
childhood spent with foster parents and in juvenile
workhouses, John Rowlands Bastard moved to New Orleans (USA)
in February 1859 where he changed his name several times -
sometimes calling himself Morley, Morelake and Moreland.
Finally he settled on Henry Morton Stanley which he claimed
was the name of a rich benefactor he lived with in New
Orleans.

Stanley would become a soldier, sailor, newspaperman and
famous explorer feted by the high and mighty on both sides
of the Atlantic. He was knighted by Britain and elected to
parliament.

Though records show that Stanley wrote love letters to at
least three women, he himself confessed despairingly in
1886: "The fact is, I can't talk to women". He eventually
married "the eccentric high-society portrait painter"
Dorothy Tennant on 12 July 1890 in a lavish wedding ceremony
at Westminster Abbey in London, attended by the good and
great of Britain, including Prime Minister Gladstone. Yet,
Hochschild provides evidence showing that Stanley's "great
fear of women" prevented him from ever consummating his
marriage.

After his honeymoon, Stanley himself wrote in his dairy; "I
do not regard it wifely, to procure these pleasures, at the
cost of making me feel like a monkey in a cage". To which
his biographer, Frank McLynn adds: "Stanley's fear of women
was so great that when he was finally called upon to satisfy
a wife, [he] in effect broke down and confessed that he
considered sex for the beasts."

Hochschild adds his own telling comment: "Whether this
inference is right or wrong, the inhibitions that caused
Stanley so much pain are a reminder that the explorers and
soldiers who carried out the European seizure of Africa were
often not the bold, bluff, hardy men of legend, but
restless, unhappy, driven men, in flight from something in
their past or in themselves. The economic explanations of
imperial expansion -the search for raw materials, labour and
markets - are all valid, but there was pyschological fuel as
well."

Here Stanley had a common link with his ultimate employer,
King Leopold II. Hochschild tells how the "loveless
marriage" of Leopold's parents affected the young prince.
"If Leopold wanted to see his father, he had to apply for an
audience". The cold atmosphere in which he grew up haunted
him in later life. He became an "ungainly, haughty young man
whom his first cousin Queen Elizabeth of England thought
'very odd' and in the habit of 'saying disagreeable things
to people'," says Hochschild.

Like his parents, Leopold and his wife, Marie-Henriette
"loathed each other at first sight, feelings that apparently
never changed", Hochschild continues. "Like many young
couples of the day, the newlyweds apparently found sex a
frightening mystery." Queen Victoria became their
sex-educator. She and her husband, Prince Albert, gave
Leopold and his wife (visiting from Brussels) tips about how
to consummate their marriage. Several years later, when
Marie-Henriette became pregnant, Leopold wrote to Prince
Albert thanking him for "the wise and practical advice you
gave me...[It] has now borne fruit."

When Leopold finally ascended the throne in 1865, his
undying desire was to own colonies. He tried everything
under the sun to get a colony to no avail, including
offering to buy the Philippines from Spain, buying lakes in
the Nile and draining them out, or trying to lease territory
on the island of Formosa.

He despised Belgium's small size. "Small country, small
people" was how he described his little Belgium that had
only become independent in 1830. The brutal expeditions of
Stanley in Africa finally offered Leopold the chance to land
his prized jewel, Congo.

Stanley had made two "journalistic" trips to Africa, first
in 1869 to find David Livingstone. The second was in 1874
where, starting from Zanzibar with 356 people (mostly
Africans), he "attacked and destroyed 28 large towns and
three or four score villages" (his own words) as he
plundered his way down to Boma and the mouth of the Congo
River on the Atlantic coast.

In 1879, Stanley was off again to Africa, this time under
commission from King Leopold to colonise Congo for him.
Stanley used the gun, cheap European goods and plain-faced
deceit to win over 450 local chiefs and their people and
take over their land.

Stanley apparently remembered how the 22-sq-mile Manhattan
Island in New York Bay had been "bought" from the Native
Americans by the Dutch colonial officer, Peter Minuit, with
trinkets valued at just $24.

If Minuit could do it in Manhattan, Stanley could do it,
too, in the Congo. Only that in his case, he just asked the
Congolese chiefs to mark Xs to legal documents written in a
foreign language they had not seen before. Stanley called
them treaties, like this one signed on 1 April 1884 by the
chiefs of Ngombi and Mafela:

In return for "one piece of cloth per month to each of the
undersigned chiefs, besides present of cloth in hand, they
promised to freely of their own accord, for themselves and
their heirs and successors for ever...give up to the said
Association [set up by Leopold] the sovereignty and all
sovereign and governing rights to all their
territories...and to assist by labour or otherwise, any
works, improvements or expeditions which the said
Association shall cause at any time to be carried out in any
part of these territories... All roads and waterways running
through this country, the right of collecting tolls on the
same, and all game, fishing, mining and forest rights, are
to be the absolute property of the said Association."

With treaties like this, Stanley set forth to colonise Congo
for Leopold. But the French would not let them have all the
laugh. They sent Count Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza on their
own colonising mission. De Brazza landed north of the Congo
River, curved out an enclave for France and had a town named
after him (Brazzaville). The enclave eventually became known
as Congo Brazzaville, where the French too unleashed their
own brutality on the local people.

Meanwhile Stanley was doing a "good" job across the river
for Leopold, building a railway and a dirt road to skirt the
220-mile descent of the river. This was to facilitate the
shipping of Congo's abundant ivory and other wealth to
Belgium to enrich Leopold and his petit pays. In 1884,
Stanley finally left for home in England, his work for
Leopold done.

Leopold next sent in his hordes, including Leon Rom, to use
absolute terror to rule the land and ship out the wealth.

It was the brutality of Leopold's agents that would catch
the eye of the world and lead to his forced sale of Congo to
the Belgian government in 1908.

Ivory had been the initial prized Congo export for Leopold.
Then something happened by accident in far away Ireland that
dramatically changed the fate of Leopold, his Congo and its
people. John Dunlop, an Irish veterinary surgeon, was
tinkering with his son's bicycle in Belfast and accidentally
discovered how to make an inflatable rubber tire for the
bike. He set up a tire company in 1890 named after himself,
Dunlop, and a new major industry was up and running. Rubber
became the new gold, and Leopold was soon laughing all the
way to the bank.

The huge rainforest of Congo teemed with wild rubber, and
Leopold pressed his agents for more of it. This is when the
genocide reached its peak. Tapping wild rubber was a
difficult affair, and Leopold's agents had to use brutal
force to get the people of Congo to go into the forests and
gather rubber for Leopold. Any Congolese man who resisted
the order, saw his wife kidnapped and put in chains to force
him to go and gather rubber. Or sometimes the wife was
killed in revenge.

As more villages resisted the rubber order, Leopold's agents
ordered the Force Publique army to raid the rebellious
villages and kill the people. To make sure that the soldiers
did not waste the bullets in hunting animals, their officers
demanded to see the amputated right hand of every person
they killed. As Hochschild puts it, "the standard proof was
the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a
corpse. 'Sometimes', said one officer to a missionary,
'soldiers shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they
then cut off a hand from a living man'. In some military
units, there was even a 'keeper of the hands', his job was
the smoking [of them]."

Fortunately for the people, Edmund Dene Morel, a clerk of a
Liverpool shipping line used by Leopold to ship out Congo's
wealth, discovered on his several journeys to the Belgian
port of Antwerp in the 1890s that while rubber and ivory
were shipped from Congo to Antwerp, only guns and soldiers
were going from Antwerp to Congo. This marked the beginning
of his massive newspaper campaign to expose Leopold and his
atrocities in the Congo.

Morel's campaign in Europe and America finally forced
Britain to ask its consul in Congo, the Irish patriot Sir
Roger Casement, to make an investigative trip all over Congo
and report. Casement's findings were so damning that the
Foreign Office in London was too embarrassed that it could
not publish the original.

Casement's description of "sliced hands and penises was far
more graphic and forceful than the British government had
expected". When the Foreign Office finally published a
sanitised version of his report, an angry Casement sent a
stinking 18-page letter of protest to his superiors in the
Foreign Office, threatening to resign. He called his
superiors "a gang of stupidities" and "a wretched set of
incompetent noodles."

In the end, the Belgian government was forced to step in and
buy Congo from Leopold in 1908. Negotiations for the buy-out
started in 1906. Leopold dragged his feet for two years, but
finally, in March 1908, the deal was done.

"The Belgian government first of all agreed to assume
[Congo's] 110 million francs worth of debt, much of them in
the form of bond's Leopold had freely dispensed over the
years to [his] favourites", says Hochschild. Nearly 32
million franc of the debt was owed to the Belgian government
itself through loans it had given years earlier to Leopold.

The government also agreed to pay 45.5 million francs
towards completing Leopold's then unfinished pet building
projects. On top of all this, Leopold got another 50 million
francs (to be paid in instalments) 'as a mark of gratitude
for his great sacrifices made for the Congo.'

"Those funds were not expected to come from the Belgian
taxpayer.", Hochschild writes. "They were to be extracted
from the Congo itself."

He finishes his book on a very high note: Calling this bit
The Great Forgetting, Hochschild writes:

"From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left for
Africa was not democracy as it is practised today in
countries like England, France and Belgium; it was
authoritarian rule and plunder. On the whole continent,
perhaps no nation has had a harder time than the Congo in
emerging from the shadow of its past.

"When independence came, the country fared badly... Some
Africans were being trained for that distant day; but when
pressure grew and independence came in 1960, in the entire
territory there were fewer than 30 African university
graduates. There were no Congolese army officers, engineers,
agronomists or physicians. The colony's administration had
made few other steps toward a Congo run by its own people;
of some 5,000 management-level positions in the civil
service, only three were filled by Africans."

Yet on the day of independence, King Baudouin, the then
monarch of Belgium, had the gall to tell the Congolese in
his speech in Kinshasa: "It is now up to you, gentlemen, to
show that you are worthy of our confidence".

No cheek could be bigger! And you could well imagine how mad
the Congolese nationalists like Patrice Lumumba were
jumping.

Hochschild has written an excellent book. Africa owes him a
huge debt of gratitude. New African highly recommends the
book for compulsory reading in African schools and
universities.

Copyright (c) IC Publications Limited 1999. All rights reserved.

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